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The right-to-work dilemma

Principle and hypocrisy aside, however, the president’s statement has some validity. Let’s be honest: Right-to-work laws do weaken unions. And de-unionization can lead to lower wages.

But there is another factor at play: having a job in the first place. In right-to-work states, the average wage is about 10 percent lower. But in right-to-work states, unemployment also is about 10 percent lower.

Higher wages or lower unemployment? It is a wrenching choice. Although, you would think that liberals would be more inclined to spread the wealth — i.e., the jobs — around, preferring somewhat lower pay in order to leave fewer fellow workers mired in unemployment.

Think of the moral calculus. Lower wages cause an incremental decline in one’s well-being. No doubt. But for the unemployed, the decline is categorical, sometimes catastrophic — a loss not just of income but of independence and dignity.

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Again, not all that wrenching. Slightly lower pay in exchange for more people employed, an easier path to advancement for workers based on merit rather than seniority, less money being filtered through violent thugs, a weaker grassroots for the militant left, and one of the few small favorable steps for business owners to be made in this age.

Krauthammer’s being an idiot … again. Right-to-work has to do with the fact that unions have no right to ownership in companies. Closed-shops and forced tribute by workers to the unions are nothing but illegal and uncompensated takings of private property that have been sanctioned by our courts, for some idiotic reason. Just because I give someone a job working for MY company doesn’t mean that that person has any right to the company, which is what unions demand and get. They get to be gatekeepers to workers or, barring that, they get to collect extortion from every worker that the company hires – and somehow they think they are entitled to this or that it is really, in any sensible way, legal. It is not. I don’t care what the courts have said. No one has to pay extortion fees to some third party for a job.

And the “higher wages” of unions is nothing but a mirage. GM and Chrysler should have gone under and much of the union scum’s “higher wages” disappeared as they consumed the companies. Of course, they received tens of billions of taxpayer money to keep up the appearance of “higher union wages”.

Closed shops and extortion shops (where everyone is required to pay tribute to the union, such as in much of education) are totally and completely un-Constitutional and un-American. These are well-suited to life in the Soviet Union or Venezuela, but not in any civilized and free society. All union scum need to be shipped to the marxist state of their choice. I’d happily pay for that.

…or we could have higher wages and greater employment by ridding ourselves of the free trade agreements that we’ve foolishly signed.

Stoic Patriot on December 14, 2012 at 8:57 PM

No, then you turn America into one big union shop. Just as employers fled non-RTW states when the cost of the unions got too high, so they would do to America as a whole (and are doing). An hour’s worth of work is something that is for sale in this economy like anything else. In a capitalist economy, if you put in any policy that negatively affects price elasticity, you pay the price elsewhere. This is why the minimum wage is a really bad idea. It introduced an artificial price floor and the result has been something like a 70% unemployment rate among minority teenagers. We would be better off if the MW was a suggestion, a starting point in the discussion of wage between employers and job seekers.

If AT&T switched calls today the way they did a hundred years ago, every female between the ages of 18 and 59 would work for the phone company. Has electronic call switching cost those jobs? Yes. Are all those women starving in the streets? No. Why? Because electronic switching enabled other industries like cell phones and the Internet. Those industries picked up the slack on those jobs. Are we going to lose all our manufacturing jobs to China? Probably. Will something come in to replace those jobs? More than likely.